I began the year with perhaps the grandest book on political history in modern times. I was prompted to finally delve into Dean Acheson’s ‘Present at the Creation’ by the memoirs of Lionel Barber, the former editor of the Financial Times’s ‘The Powerful and the Damned’ who described it as the most influential book he ever read. Published in 1969, Acheson’s memoir does not only have a grand and pretentious title, it is also a magnus opus with a magisterial sweep that only the pompous Acheson could pull off.
Our current interconnected, global world with few centres of power, is very much a twentieth century phenomenon. Prior to this, what existed were multiple, sometimes, competing powers, from the Holy Roman Empire that lasted a thousand years from 800 until its demise in the early 1800s; various Chinese Dynasties that ruled the roost across much of Northern and Eastern Asia until the Qing Dynasty came to an end in 1912; the Russian Empire that ran from the early eighteenth century until overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917; the Ottoman Empire, stretching from North Africa, across much of the Middle East to southern and eastern Europe, that finally disintegrated after WWI; and, of course, the British Empire, perhaps the most global, in geographical reach at least, from the sixteenth century until the sun set on it in the 1950 and 1960s.
It wasn’t until WWI that the outlines of our current globalised world order began to emerge. As I wrote in a 2018 article, ‘World War I and the remaking of the global order’, the creation of much of the modern world and its global institutions and principles (such as universal declaration of human rights) has its roots in the international arrangements that were put in place after the Great War ended in 1918.
Much of this was not crystallised though until after 1945 with the establishment of such political organisations as the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organisation (WTO)) which together, redefined modern international relations, global trade, and finance. Today, the United Nations and its agencies, along with its myriad of resolutions, govern and mediate relations among nations. The Bretton Woods architecture and blueprint govern much of global finance and trade that is more integrated and inter-dependent than ever before.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created in the same period and gave the world a transatlantic military alliance between Europe and America as was the European Union, which emerged from the ruins of WWII.
The rearrangement of the world after 1918 and 1945, when the Allied forces emerged victorious, conferred preeminent power on the United States and has since sought to shape the world in line with its vision. And its handmaiden was indeed Dean Acheson, Secretary of State from 1949-1953 and previously undersecretary at the State Department from 1945 under Harry Truman.
This post-WWII order was shaped largely by Acheson; he could even be described as its midwife –in terms of foreign policy and international relations at least. He led the US delegation at the Bretton Woods conference and designed the Marshall Plan for the recovery of postwar Europe.
Acheson was the author of the Truman Doctrine, emerging from the US’s response to George Keenan’s famous telegram on the implications of what he called “Stalin’s startling speech” in 1946. Stalin’s thesis that “internal conflicts of capitalism [would] inevitably generate wars” and the need for Soviet Russia to prioritise rearmament above all else, sent shockwaves across the world that had just emerged from a destructive world war. Acheson’s state department’s response to the Soviet ‘threat’ pretty much defined and governed American Cold War policy for nearly half a century.
Acheson presided over the Korean War, the establishment of NATO, US policy on China pre Nixon and early interventions in Iran whose consequences continue to reverberate.
Despite changes at the edges and the rise of China, the globalised world and international order we know today is largely Dean Acheson’s creation, rising from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the two Japanese cities obliterated in the world’s first use of atomic bombs that brought WWII to an end.
What is not universally known, however, is the uranium used to produce those bombs came from the Shinkolobwe mines in the Katanga province of the then Belgian Congo. The use of atomic bombs marked a radical departure from conventional warfare and thrust the world into the dangerous era of mutually assured destruction.
Besides the science and technology, the most important ingredient for making such deadly weapons is high grade uranium which only the Shinkolobwe mines possessed in rich abundance at the time. The imperative to keep this out of the hands of the ‘enemy’ became an existential policy of the United States who went to great lengths to ensure that the Soviets had no access to such nuclear material with the onset of Acheson’s Cold War.
For this, the US deployed the full and extensive might of its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overturn the democratic process underway in the Congo, leading to the authorised assassination of its first elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, and the mysterious death of then UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, in a still unexplained plane crash in Katanga province.
This is the central thesis of Susan Williams’s tour de force, ‘White Malice- The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa’ – quite easily, my pick of 2021. Possibly the most extensive book on the activities of CIA operations and American willingness to go to any lengths to keep Congo’s rich uranium and other mineral deposits out of the hands of anyone considered an enemy, particularly its key protagonists in the Cold War.
The protection of Congo’s large deposits of uranium was most paramount and if that meant plotting assassinations with the white minority government in neighbouring Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) or colluding with Portuguese colonialists in Angola – through which the Benguela railroad run, providing the transit route for the shipment of ores from Katanaga to the Atlantic Ocean – then so be it. Everything was on the table, including the use of poison and mind-altering drugs.
Lumumba’s radical nationalism and strong desire for the people of Congo to have control over their natural resources made him a target. The notorious CIA station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin, did not mince his words about the existential nature of the choices faced by the US when he said this of Lumumba: “I can say only that I believed that his lack of understanding of world politics and his dalliance with the Soviet Union made him a serious danger to the United States. We were, after all, involved in a major war, albeit a cold one. Had the Soviet Union succeeded in gaining control of a large part of the African continent and its resources, it could have carried us over the thin red line into a Hot War. In a Hot War, one has to kill one’s enemies or be defeated. In the Cold War it was much the same, only one had to remove the enemy from a position of power in which he could contribute to the weakening of the United States’ role in the world.”
‘By mere coincidence’, on the day Lumumba was killed, allegedly by rebel forces, the head of the CIA’s clandestine operations, the CIA station chief in Luxembourg (who supplied one of the key agents) and the Head of the CIA’s Africa Division, Bronson Tweedy, were all ‘visiting’ the Congo.
The CIA was all over the Congo like a rash and infiltrated many aspects of life across the continent. As the author observed, the Church Committee (named after Senator Frank Church who chaired the 1975 US Senate Committee that investigated the operations of the federal intelligence agencies) created a “misleading impression that CIA operations in Africa were limited in scope” and “cast a fog of invisibility” over many of the clandestine and covert activities they were engaged in through an extensive network of agents and masquerades, across Africa and even at the newly minted UN Headquarters in New York.
These included “Africans brought to the US [to study at prestigious Universities like Harvard] … and cultural patronage through Paris and elsewhere” all of it underpinned by large amounts of money.
It is estimated that “between 1960 and 1968, CIA activity in the Congo ‘ranked as the largest covert operation in the agency’s history costing … $90-$150m’ excluding the ‘costs of aircraft, weapons, transportation and maintenance services provided by the Department of Defense’ The moneys were distributed, “both within the US and in Africa, through a range of conduits, including dummy organisations and pass-throughs such as the Farfield Foundation.”
When Wole Soyinka discovered that sponsoring organisations for many African intellectual and cultural projects such as the first Congress of African Writers and Intellectuals held at the University of Makerere in June 1962, were themselves sponsored by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and the Fairchild Foundation, he was outraged. “Nothing, virtually no project, no cultural initiative was left unbrushed by the CIA reptilian coils’ he is reported to have said. Not one of us, he disclaimed, “had the slightest suspicion that a Fairfield Foundation of America, which so lavishly expended its resources on the continent’s post-colonial intellectual thought and creativity, was a front for the American CIA!”
But it was not only unsuspecting cultural figures, writers and intellectuals who were targets; “bribes were handed out to selected politicians, to union leaders and to diplomats at the UN” who were bought during the tussle over whether ceremonial President Kasavubu’s delegation should be credentialed in preference to the elected Prime Minister’s, at independent Congo’s first UN sitting.
Knowingly or otherwise, prominent African Americans too, played their part for Uncle Sam in this struggle to keep Congo pro-Western. Some like Louis Armstrong toured the Congo, Ghana, and many African countries for propaganda purposes, even as the government he represented abroad was pushing back against equal rights for Blacks at home. Those like Paul Robeson who were considered too dangerous, ended up in mental institutions.
There were also businessmen from Maurice Tempelsman to Harold Hochschild with extensive networks across Africa and the Congo, both associated and friends with Adlai Stevenson, former Democratic Presidential candidate and at the time, UN ambassador.
Harold Hochschild was chairman of the board of trustees for American Metal Climax “with a vast network of mines in Africa”, Williams notes. His AMC also financed the African American Institute (AAI) whose house journal was the Africa Special Report (later the Africa Report). The board of the AAI included African American intellectuals such as Horace Bond who was president of Lincoln University while Kwame Nkrumah was studying there, and Edwin Munger, formerly of Caltech, among others.
Sadly, the AAI was a CIA front too. Here is how Adam Hochschild, son of Harold and author of ‘King Leopold’s Ghost’, described his father’s reaction when the media revealed this: ‘The next time I saw him’, he wrote, ‘he seemed uncomfortable. He defended the link, saying that in its early years there was nowhere else the Institute could have gotten enough money for its work. But he was clearly embarrassed that the whole thing had had to be kept secret.’
For the military, “CIA funds were used to pay soldiers’ wages and for weapons… set up airlines under cover and to buy and deliver aircraft, including the Fouga that may have shot down the plane carrying Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld.”
Intrinsic to the Cold War struggle, Williams argues, “was America’s wish to maintain absolute control over the uniquely rich uranium at the Shinkolobwe mine in the Congo. The aim was achieved in the 1960s and maintained until at least the expulsion in 1997 of Mobutu Sese Seko”, as President.
More than sixty years on, Congo, the second largest country in Africa and certainly the most well-endowed with large deposits of mineral resources, remains volatile and unstable. It has certainly not benefited from its riches and in the twenty-first century a new battle ground looms around cobalt, the resource in greatest demand for the future of clean energy, which Congo, once again, has the largest global deposits.
O, the blessed curse of the Congo!
Ekow Nelson
London, January 1st, 2022
Picks of 2021 – Post WWII Order
‘Present at the Creation’, Dean Acheson
‘White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa’, Susan Williams
reimagining 